Claude Simon

A Retrospective

This collection of essays celebrates the work of the French Nobel prize-winning novelist Claude Simon. Scholars from France, Germany, the United States and the United Kingdom reconsider the fifty years of Simon?s fiction in the light of his large-scale autobiographical novel Le Jardin des Plantes (1997). From a variety of perspectives? postmodernist, psychoanalytic, aesthetic? contributors reflect on the central paradox of Simon?s work: his writing and rewriting of an experience of war so disruptive and traumatic that words can never be adequate to communicate it. The layers of artifice in L.